Why so war-brained, my fellow americans?
Why so war-brained, my fellow americans?
It’s so frustrating trying to talk to Americans about foreign policy. Most recently, we have all these stories about China stopping western warplanes from entering Chinese territory being spun as Chinese aggression. As if flying armed jets less than 100 miles off the coast of a country you threaten on a near-daily basis isn’t threatening them. No one even questions why these jets are flying so near Chinese airspace. What business does a Canadian jet have off the coast of China, other than to threaten and intimidate? I mean, the most recent one was literally on a mission to intimidate North Korea. Fucking frustrating.
you can't intimidate china, they are provoking it trying to get them to fire first and pose as victims of the "evil warmongering yellow man"
Neither.
They are checking response time and tactics. This is the same reason Russia flies jets off of the coast of Scotland and Alaska.
All three!
They had a reporter crew with them. I genuinely think in this case they would have liked China to fire so they could have spun their deaths and the whole incident as especially bad. Well that and having those bourgeois bootlicking propagandists on-board allows them to point to them as ‘independent’ sources that they were doing no wrong.
yeah, talking about foreign policy is annoying indeed when the other thinks they can do whatever they want because allegedly god gave them the right to do so.
guess what? u fucking can't.
The media does most of the heavy lifting. You won’t see Fox or CNN say Russia should win, they won’t say Palestine should win, so everyone just follows what their only news sources (not literally, but anything beyond those is conspiracies to them) parrot to them back from US state propaganda
can someone post the parenti quote?
The quote
In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests tirelessly propagated anticommunism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a political analysis. During the Cold War, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.
-- Michael Parenti, Blackshirts And Reds
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Not to mention when a weather balloon flies off course, Americans start panicking. It's absurd on so many levels.
Even when it’s an Illinois Amateur Weather Balloon Troupe’s 🙃
They really have been inflating the importance of this event
All airspace is American airspace doncha know?
BuT iTs DiSpUtEd! That means anyone can fly there, right??? Right???
When I was 10 years old other kids in my class talked about dropping nukes on the Middle East to just get rid of them. Absolute hellscape
Same
I personally know enough Burgerlanders to know that many of them want (more) war for the crude and simple reason that it's exciting to them. When they were younger, they nodded along to Rush Limbaugh lamenting that the US military was supposedly becoming a "Meals on Wheels" service instead of performing enough atrocities to give him and his fans the giggles. That attitude never left.
One of my chuddiest relatives unironically quoted General Jack Ripper and said "an unused weapon is a useless weapon" without the slightest apparent awareness that Jack Ripper was a comically ridiculous caricature that wanted to destroy the world because he felt tired after sex.
Why so war-brained, my fellow Americans?
Wow, that's great. Matches my sense as a white American man that people I know and grew up with enthusiastically consumed racist ways of thinking offered to them.
I could only read the intro, but I appreciate what I read so far. Brainwashing definitely was a western invention, to attempt to cope with the defection rate in Korea, to my understanding. Which led directly to MK Ultra and other horrific experiments on unwilling and unknowing citizens.
I’ll check the rest out after work, thanks for sharing!
We single-handedly won WWII, and we saved the world from communism with our $tar War, and we continue to spread peace & democracy & humanitarian aid & a rules-based order with our freedom bombs and debt traps. You’re welcome; no need to thank us, you thankless shithole countries.
That’s what people think here, and it’s exhausting.
It is the incapability of putting yourself in other shoes, i.e. solidarity.
They either can't comprehend that flying bombers directly into a territory and turning back at the last possible moment is provocation, or they know its provocation but they just argue in bad faith.
Btw they do this every single year against the DPRK, but they're the crazy warmongers!
To be fair it is difficult to put yourself in other shoes when they are being thrown at your face because of all the war crimes you did
tough question. this is pretty much the theme of the movie 'bowling for columbine'